Monday, August 11, 2014

Book Review: Follow the River

In
the 1700s, Mary Draper Ingles has everything torn away from her when Shawnee
Indians massacre her Virginia settlement. She watches horrified as a neighbor’s
baby has its head smashed open, then her mother’s scalp is waved in front of
her. Pregnant and with two young boys, she is taken captive and forced to ride
and walk far beyond where any white people have settled. All she can do is
memorize landmarks along the way, although she receives hostile looks when she
glances back to see what a course back would look like.

She
gives birth in squalid, unclean conditions. Only her dignified air makes the
Shawnee leader respect her enough to grant her some material comforts as she is
forced to continue the journey without pause, along a river larger than any she
has seen before. Mary is determined to escape and return home, hoping her
husband is still alive. But how can she make it all the way back on foot, all
those hundreds of miles?

Follow the River by James
Alexander Thom is historical fiction based on the incredible true story of Mary
Draper Ingles, who walked an estimated eight hundred miles along the Ohio River
and through the Appalachian Mountains.

Thoms
describes the ordeal in vivid detail. In this passage, Mary recovers from her
numbness after the massacre:

Her skin began
to tell her of the humid valley air, the trickling of her own sweat, the
crawling of wood ticks, the bites and stings of mosquitoes and no-see-ums, the
rubbing of the horse’s hair against the inside of her knees, the whip and drag
of leafy branches across her face and shoulders.

This
description continues as Mary passes through scenery beyond her imagination,
encounters Shawnee culture, plots her escape, and makes the arduous journey
back.

I
highly recommend Follow the River as
an engrossing account of an unlikely survival story, and also as a slice of
life that exposes a violent period of American history. I have to make a couple
of qualifications: If you didn’t like the part about a baby’s head getting
smashed open, there are other gory details as the Shawnee torture other white
captives. And for some reason, Thom has Mary daydream about having sexual
relations with her husband, in too much detail. I have no idea why he did that,
but it makes the book for adults only.